Priscilla Renea – Come to Her Doll House

A high placed industry executive contacted us one day and stated that they wanted me to listen to this 21-year-old recording artist who they believed was the next biggest superstar. I was a bit reluctant at first because I hear this all the time from new artists and their management so I just told them “send me their EPK” and I will listen to it when I had the time. We don’t usually get excited about an artist the way she was carrying on about this young lady so I had to really sit down and see what all the hype was about. Sure enough their depiction of this incredibly talented young lady was a understatement. Her sound was fresh and really fun to listen to and definitely the type of music I could see my teenage daughters playing in their stereos.

Priscilla Renea is a YouTube sensation and she tells us how she used the Internet and ingenuity to garner attention around her project. She explains how she began uploading videos to YouTube just after Justine Timberlake did the “My Grammy Moment” contest, which she entered, and although she didn’t win the contest, she was determined to make her mark. It wasn’t until 2006 when she uploaded another video where she performed the song “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” which was from the Dream girls soundtrack. She stated the video received hundreds of thousand of views, which convinced her that this was the best way to promote herself. “When a new song would come out I would be one of the first to record a video for it so when someone went to look for that artist’s version, they would find my version and I continued to do this for a year.” Although this was an unorthodox method of promoting one’s music it clearly proved to be successful for Ms. Renee.

Realizing that she had to keep her momentum flowing she sang the first five pages of the dictionary and uploaded it to YouTube. She then wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of YouTube and said “Hey there’s this girl and she is really cool and her name is Prescilla Renee and she is singing the dictionary and you should check her out and add it to the front page of YouTube.” Well the next day when she woke up she boasts that she had over a million messages in her mailbox from people telling her she was featured on YouTube. From that little stunt her myspace and YouTube pages skyrocketed with high numbers for over a month until one day she received an email from Rico Collins inquiring whether she had management or not and at some point he flew her to Atlanta to meet with Kenny Cole who she began writing songs with and someone she became very close to like a brother.

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